In France, the expansion of printing and the spread of literacy were
accompanied by debates concerning French spelling. These debates have
generally been understood within a narrative of progress that explains
how the archaic spelling of the Renaissance was modernized to become
the spelling we practice today. I tell a different story by taking
account of the central role that gender played in these debates. In this
story, the phonetic spelling associated with women is rejected by men
of letters, whose primary concern is to establish the authority of the
written over the spoken word. Under the new orthographic regime of the
eighteenth century, the way women spelled was no longer seen as a model
for reform, but as a source of shame. At a time when elite women and
girls were expected to be able to write an elegant letter, their "poor"
spelling reinforced the growing understanding of them as naturally naive,
fearful, and lazy, especially in the face of tasks deemed intellectually
and physically challenging. By identifying poor spelling as a source of
social embarrassment, men of letters and writing masters encouraged women
and girls to be self-conscious about how they wrote and to experience
a new sense of shame about it.

This article investigates the tactics and strategies developed during the
Provisional Consulate to stabilize the new regime in southern Champagne
while reporting on the relevant findings of the international colloquium
on Brumaire held in Rouen, France. In the department of the Aube, the
threat from below helped to push local elites into
accepting the Consulate, particularly once it showed its commitment
to the preservation of order. The rest of the article investigates the
socioprofessional breakdown of officeholders in the Aube and demonstrates
the techniques developed by the prefect to win support from the local
elite. The success of these methods shifted a department considered on
the edge of revolt in 1799 to staunch support of Bonaparte.

In the midst of the Damascus Affair, another diplomatic case involving the
government of Adolphe Thiers and the rights of Jews was unfolding, unknown
to the public. In June 1840 the government of the Papal States attempted
to seize the newborn daughter of a French Jewish couple in Rome on the
grounds that she had been secretly baptized and thus could not be allowed
to remain with her Jewish parents. In contrast to the Damascus case, in
which the French prime minister defended the prosecution of the Jews for
ritual murder, in the Montel case Thiers took an aggressive stand against
the Vatican and in favor of the Jews. The development and denouement of
the Montel case, based both on French diplomatic correspondence and on
previously secret Vatican documents, are examined, and the light that
the case sheds on Thiers and on French diplomatic policy is discussed.

France's appropriation of Algeria's Roman past has traditionally
been interpreted as a justification of its colonial activities in the
area. However, the volume and variety of texts
generated by the French on Rome's legacy suggest a more complex
explanation. This article traces the evolution of the France-Rome
connection from the time of conquest to the post–Second World War
period. It examines its differing guises under the military and civilian
administrations and explicates its development from a body of knowledge
that served as a referential guide to an ideology of regionalism and
difference, which bound Algeria to France and effectively marginalized
the Arabs and Berbers. The past "imagined" in this process became part
of the foundational mythology of the colony and was thus incorporated
into its "collective" memory.

Until recently Alexis Carrel was mostly remembered as the winner of
the 1912 Nobel Prize in Medicine and the author of the international
best-selling book Man, the Unknown (1935). In the past decade,
however, the rising tide of xenophobia and the debates on Vichy redefined
the understanding of Carrel's legacy by paying closer attention to
his scientific racism and fascist inclinations. This article explores
Carrel's eugenics and the work of the Fondation Française pour
l'Etude des Problèmes Humains, a research institution set up
by Vichy that Carrel headed until his death in 1944. It argues that
the wartime foundation played a vital role in the formulation and
institutionalization of modern population thinking. Its empirical,
multidisciplinary, and technocratic model of population research became
a powerful instrument of policy making that enabled the state to design
an array of pronatalist, eugenic, and social hygiene policies.